. Standing next to it is the
neuroanatomist Frederick C. Kenyon.|left The discovery of
Palaeocastor sprang from the discovery of "devil's corkscrews" in the plains of
Sioux County, Nebraska, as a tree-sized, screw-like underground formation. Its basic form is an elongated spiral of hardened earth material that inserts into the soil as deep as . These puzzling structures first came to notice through Dr.
Erwin Hinckley Barbour of the
University of Nebraska around
Harrison, Nebraska, in 1891 and 1892. Barbour then described them as giant freshwater sponges. This identification was influenced by the surroundings where the "screws" were situated; the deposits in which they occur were laid down in immense freshwater lakes in the
Miocene Epoch, 20 million years ago. For a time, people tended to believe that the spiral forms were a curious type of extinct vegetation, although many remained skeptical. In 1892, Dr. Barbour proposed that the devil's corkscrews were the
burrows of large
rodents, and Latinized the name to the
ichnofossil name
Daimonhelix,
Daimonelix, or
Daemonelix (all these spellings are found) and classified them by shape and size. This does seem to contradict an essay by Barbour in the June 1895 volume of
The American Naturalist. Here, Dr. Barbour attempts to refute a theory put forward by Dr.
Theodor Fuchs, in which Fuchs states exactly that the
Daemonelix was just the result of the burrowing of a Miocene
gopher. In this essay, Barbour seems to be holding to the theory that the
Daemonelix was the result of calcified plant forms. One argument put forward by Barbour was that the form of the corkscrew was too perfect to have been constructed by a "reasoning creature," and must instead have been the result of plant construction (or some other lower life form). Barbour also states in this essay that the discovery of a fossilized beaver was not proof of the origin of
Daemonelix, as there has also been found the bones of "a mammal as large as a mouse." In "The Curves of Life" (Constable 1914),
Theodore Andrea Cook writes that "Other hypotheses have been put forward to explain these odd formations (i.e. the
Daemonelix), one of the most likely being that two plants are involved, one of which coiled tightly round the other....it is clear that our knowledge is not yet sufficient to produce a theory that will satisfactorily explain the facts." Again, this suggests that the Devil's Corkscrew being the result of the burrowing of the
Palaeocastor was not universally accepted in the scientific community as late as the second decade of the 20th century. The dispute on its real identity ceased when a fossilized beaver was discovered in one of them. The scratches which were previously misinterpreted as claw marks are also strong evidence of the existence of
Palaeocastor in contrast to modern
Castor. In the early 1970s, Larry Martin and Deb Bennett studied many of the Devil's Corkscrews in the field and in the lab. Their research on
Daimonelix,
Zodiolestes was most likely a predator of
Palaeocastor as one fossil was found curled up in the "corkscrew" burrow. They excavated their burrows with their
incisors, not their claws. Recent research into why
Palaeocastor fossor would have made helical burrows suggests that it was an adaptation leading to more consistent temperature and humidity level in the burrow as the climate became warmer and drier in the early Miocene. ==References==